Tourist, Volume One

As the transportation industry causes the world to grow increasingly smaller, travel has become an option for many who years ago would have never considered applying for a passport. Consequently, the travel stories that most intrigue me involve the juxtaposition of  disparate worlds coming together.   

"Tourist, Volume One" explores what happens when people find themselves completely out of the context of their normal lives. Travel has the potential to strip away and show clearly those aspects of the individual that familiarity and routine conspire to conceal. In this collection of stories, I want to know what my characters would have missed about themselves if they had just stayed home.

The stories also strive to understand those unique properties of movement: what it does, how it works, and what is forever different as a result of it.

The settings of these stories are all places I have come to know well through my own motion addiction, which has taken me to all fifty states and probably at least fifty countries. The stories bring the readers from one end of the world to another, celebrating the essence of the many places from which they themselves are never more than three bad movies and several bags of peanuts away.

The following are the beginnings of the five stories that make up Tourist: Volume One.

 Malin Head, Ireland

The wind off the ocean rocked his car, and it felt like he had been blown across so many places before finally coming to rest along an empty road at the northernmost point of  Ireland. He opened the car door and felt the gale- force breath of solitude upon his face and through his hair. Behind him the lights of the town shone sparsely like the lonely stars that could not be seen through the clouds. Ahead, the sea pounded the cliffs and he walked in the direction that was the same direction they had walked –she and he –when November raged and they had found such joy in it.

Back then, the old woman at the Spinnaker Inn had used the term ‘desperate’ to describe the weather, and it was how he remembered it being, past Redcastle, past Moville, Gleneely and Culdaff, until they could go no further. The strangers they had met along the way had all known that the Spinnaker in Malin Head was the only place that would be open for dinner that late and that time of year. They had driven past it twice, not seeing anything in its still, whitewashed front to suggest something there that wasn’t down the road a little bit, or back at the crossroad where they had been instructed to turn. It was she who had noticed the empty parking lot across the street which led them to the heavy wooden door that would finally open for them with a sharp crack. Yes, of course it was the Spinnaker, the old woman had said, and yes, they were open. The entrance was really the next door over and hadn’t they seen it? No matter, she had led them down a hallway where a man was drinking alone behind a makeshift counter and then she opened a door to a bar and restaurant that was empty.

“Sit anywhere you like. I’ll stoke up the fire.”

So the old woman had greeted them each of those many nights as they made their way out of the cold and past the wooden bar arching into the middle of the room while all around and beside lonely plastic chairs pleaded like orphans surrounded by clocks and mirrors courtesy of the Guinness corporation.  The bar collected several poker machines and video games which sporadically leaked odd electronic sounds. The fire was by the bar and by the bar, too, were a few tables warmer than the rest. On the wall, a toucan remarked, “I Think I’ll Have a Guinness.

 Raleigh, North Carolina

 “You got the tickets?"

"How many times are going to ask me that?"

 "So you do have them?"

 "Just shut  the fuck up and drive.”

 This was them –Vincent and Stevie –and they were just leaving, out and away and past and beyond what Vincent would call ‘pretty much New Jersey’, and that was up to White Plains and down to Bayonne and over one way to the Poconos, and then sideways over to those places on the first part of Long Island where his cousins sometimes lived whenever their parents hadn’t kicked them out. But ‘pretty much New Jersey’ definitely did not include –and this was important –any part of that fucking island between the bridges that sucked even worse now than Vincent remembered it sucking for his whole life long.

“You want to listen to Bruce?” Stevie asked from the front seat.

“Fuck no,” Vincent replied from the back seat.

Pause

“So we’re going to drive the New Jersey Turnpike on our way to a Springsteen concert and no Bruce?”

“Stevie,” Vincent said real serious and why did he always have to explain stuff like this? “think of what it is that you and me are gonna do tonight.”

Totally silent then, except for the goddamned racket made by the hole in the muffler and it was getting bigger. Pricks at Midas: Lifetime guarantee my ass. Lies and bullshit is what it was, all of it, as Vincent lay there, scrunched up across the back seat of his 1984 Monte Carlo, trying like hell to take back some of the seven hours of sleep stolen from him that morning/afternoon.  And he would have, too, taken it all back, except for the noise, the fucking noise, the goddamned noise-plus the fact that some asshole made the car too small. So he flopped around –stomach, side, back –looking for another eight inches, because they had to get up at seven (A.M. not P.M.!) because Bruce –that mother-fucking-sell-out-son-of-a-bitch-guitar-strumming-asshole –was playing a concert in some place called Raleigh, North Carolina, and so the two of them –Vincent and Stevie – had to wake up way early just to get there because –because- it was like, ten hours driving and they only could borrow enough money for one night at a hotel, to do –to do –what had to be done –what it was just fucking necessary to do at this point in time –because Vincent could not take any more of it no more, and even if it meant leaving New Jersey for some cow state, well…

 Aukland, New Zealand

The line continued on in circles; circles within circles; more people, more circles going nowhere but on and on –and on. When his hosts looked away, Hank would close his eyes. Maybe he could sleep for ten or twenty seconds while standing up and moving. Maybe he could  be somewhere else, entirely.

"And the view at the top, three-hundred and sixty degrees all around, as far as the eye can see –New Zealand,” his host  Malcolm seemed to be the one speaking.

 "Right now you’re at the bottom of the tallest building in the southern hemisphere,”  Angus, his other New Zealand host added.  “That’s why they call it the ‘Skytower.’”

The  restaurant rotates so the view keeps changing.”

“Rotates slowly, so you don’t chunk up your food.”

“Be a mess, wouldn’t it?”

“Our American guest here, he’d take points off for that I’m sure.”

“Scratch New Zealand right off his list and they’d have their little event in Australia, instead.”

Briefing notes: ‘New Zealanders are a practical, straight forward, people; an ‘eight-gage wire’ people: resourceful, economical, able to fix any problem with a little wire and a lot of ingenuity. Direct at times, not ones to put on airs. Often, their seemingly combative banter can be, in fact, a kind of friendship ritual. But this isn’t always the case. Sometimes it is just…’

“Most people don’t know that New Zealand has the tallest building in half the world.”

“Most Americans don’t, anyway. Don’t know  much about anything outside of America, really. Unless they need a target.”

“You know  he’s only joking with you, don’t you? Having a laugh at your expense.”

There would have been a directive sent from the national office instructing Malcolm and Angus –board members of the local branch of the organization –to act as hosts to Hank, who otherwise was a perfect stranger.

“My solution for world peace: An international law that says Americans can’t drop a bomb on any country unless two percent of its population can find that country on a map.”

“You know he’s joking, don’t you? He wouldn’t be saying this to you unless he liked you.”

 Wyoming

He stood waiting, cars passing, continuing on while he remained alone. He considered the rhythm of the landscape in which he now found himself: a trough between the mountain waves of Wyoming. Behind him, the Big Horns crested unexpectedly from his Eastern perspective. He believed, and he had learned through elementary school geography class, that after crossing the Great Plains you came upon the Rocky Mountains. But his travels had risen like a helium balloon from Kentucky and up over the top of Lake Superior, crossing the great flat a lot further north than his third grade teacher might have considered. Now, past the mountains that appeared out of time, the Rockies spread before him and filled him with a sense of expectation. Try as he might to think otherwise, he believed something important would happen there.

But expectation is the enemy of the hitchhiker, and he knew this. ‘Can’t wait to…’ and ‘It will be better when…’ translated into the frustration of trying to get to Nashville, needing to get to Ste Saint Marie, waiting on the side of the road with your thumb extended as each car’s refusal to stop transformed everything around into somewhere you didn’t want to be.

In fact, there was absolutely no place that he needed to be: no table that he was missing from, no job from which he was on leave. All the classes had been taken and the grades had been given, and the knowledge had already begun to seep from him. He felt himself to be too young for a wife; too old to be his parent’s son, really.  As the evening sky streaked lines of pink soon to be deep red, he took comfort in the fact that soon it would be too late to call  back east. At least he knew his mother would answer, he thought; at least he wouldn’t have to force words with his father.

Between the mountain ranges, the high plains of Wyoming were an open, rolling desert with sagebrush and dust its only living things, animated by a wind that was always blowing; a wind that was like a hand on his shoulder pushing him forward or pulling him back. At the very far end of the plain he sensed herds of animals lingering, and they could have been antelope but they just as soon could have been elephants for all the distance between them, as he looked around for a phone booth he knew wouldn’t be found.

Mumbai, India

With its golden elephant gods decorating, exotic, dark help replacing white linen table cloths amid the smell of curry and spices not immediately recognizable,  "The Bombay Palace" appeared sufficiently different and thus was acceptable, and so Godfrey and Nancy went there again and again until it was as though they always had.

The food was not too bad, then it was pretty good. Describing it to friends -acquaintances really, Western Pennsylvanians forced upon them through job or apartment proximity -the food  became ‘really good,' then ‘outstanding,' and finally ‘to die for,' safe in the knowledge that the culinary reach of those to whom them spoke would never dare beyond the ‘Baked Scrod Floridian’ at Eat n' Park. Godfrey and Nancy went there often, sat in the same section served by the same waiter, and always ordered the exact same thing.

"Yes, of course I am knowing without you to say Mister Godfrey: number twenty-three for you -shrimp curry with naan  -and six,-number-six Mrs. Godfrey -Tandoori chicken with rice," said Papul, their very own Indian waiter. 

"Yes Papul - to whatever you just said," and Godfrey and Nancy both forced a laugh again, as they had learned to do.

They used to spend a lot of time correcting Papul's English, often refusing to order until he had addressed them properly.  ("What it is we are wanting today?" No, please, stop. With three-hundred and sixty-nine combined credit hours between us, you might as well put the food on the floor and refer to us as "Rover" and "Spot.") Each of them had become obsessed in this way for different reasons. A part-time English tutor at the high school, Nancy saw it as an opportunity to teach. A tenured  professor of theater at the University of Pittsburgh, Godfrey saw it as an opportunity to correct. 

 See ‘Places':    Mumbai, India